Papers by Fei Cai
Generating User-Engaging News Headlines (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Personalized news recommendation systems present the same headline to all users, making it difficult for them to understand the connection between their interests and the recommended article. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that incorporates user profiling to generate personalized headlines and a combination of automated and human evaluation methods to determine user preference for personalized headline generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate personalized headlines that meet the needs of a diverse audience. |
Enhancing Court View Generation with Knowledge Injection and Guidance (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods of natural language generation (NLG) rely on the extensive parameters of pretrained language models (PLMs) but their effectiveness may be compromised by insufficient domain-specific knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-injected prompt encoder to incorporate domain knowledge during the training stage, thereby reducing computational overhead. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms established baselines on real-world data in responsivity of claims and in the ability to transfer domain knowledge. |
Towards General Agentic Intelligence via Environment Scaling (2026.findings-acl)
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Runnan Fang, Shihao Cai, Baixuan Li, Jialong Wu, Guangyu Li, Wenbiao Yin, Xinyu Wang, Xiaobin Wang, Liangcai Su, Zhen Zhang, Shibin Wu, Zhengwei Tao, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Ningyu Zhang, Fei Huang, Wentao Zhang, Jingren Zhou
| Challenge: | Diverse real-world APIs require precise, robust function-calling intelligence, which needs agents to develop these capabilities through interaction in varied environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that scales up environments to enable agentic intelligence . they use a two-phase agent fine-tuning strategy to first endow agents with basic agentic capabilities, then specializing them for domain-specific contexts. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on -bench, -Bench, and ACEBench show that the model significantly enhances the models’ function-calling capability. |
From Graph to Word Bag: Introducing Domain Knowledge to Confusing Charge Prediction (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing charge prediction methods have shown impressive performance, but they face significant challenges when dealing with confusing charges, such as Snatch and Robbery. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach which introduces domain knowledge regarding constituent elements to guide the model in making judgments on confusing charges, much like a judge’s reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach maintains exceptional performance in imbalanced label distributions. |
STAR: SQL Guided Pre-Training for Context-dependent Text-to-SQL Parsing (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Zefeng Cai, Xiangyu Li, Binyuan Hui, Min Yang, Bowen Li, Binhua Li, Zheng Cao, Weijie Li, Fei Huang, Luo Si, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Extensive experiments show that STAR outperforms previous pre-training methods and ranks first on the leaderboard . text-to-SQL parsing aims to translate natural language (NL) questions into executable SQL queries . |
| Approach: | They propose a SQL guided pre-training framework STAR for context-dependent text-to-SQL parsing . they propose two objectives that explore context-dependence of NL utterances and SQL queries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on two downstream benchmarks and ranks first on the leaderboard. |
Self-training Improves Pre-training for Few-shot Learning in Task-oriented Dialog Systems (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale pre-trained language models have shown promising results for few-shot learning in task-oriented dialog (ToD) systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-training approach that iteratively labels the most confident unlabeled data to train a stronger Student model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves state-of-the-art pre-trained models in few-shot learning scenarios for task-oriented dialog (ToD) systems when only a small number of labeled data are available. |
UniLR: Unleashing the Power of LLMs on Multiple Legal Tasks with a Unified Legal Retriever (2025.acl-long)
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Ang Li, Yiquan Wu, Yifei Liu, Ming Cai, Lizhi Qing, Shihang Wang, Yangyang Kang, Chengyuan Liu, Fei Wu, Kun Kuang
| Challenge: | Existing retrieval methods are designed for general domains, struggling with legal knowledge, or tailored for specific legal tasks, unable to handle diverse legal knowledge types. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel retrieval method that integrates specialized knowledge into LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can perform multiple legal retrieval tasks for LLMs. |
DRK: Discriminative Rule-based Knowledge for Relieving Prediction Confusions in Few-shot Relation Extraction (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to identify relation type in low-resource scenario fall into prediction confusions owing to the limited inference ability over shallow text features. |
| Approach: | They propose a discriminative rule-based knowledge method to identify the relation type between entities in a given text in the low-resource scenario. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on four types of meta tasks with a 6.0% accuracy gain on average. |
World Modeling Makes a Better Planner: Dual Preference Optimization for Embodied Task Planning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus on action selection or use pre-trained models as world models to enhance planning capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a new learning framework that optimizes state prediction and action selection through preference learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods and GPT-4o on VoTa-Bench and Qwen2-VL (7B), LLaVA-1.6 (7B) and LLama-3.2 (11B). |
CoEvo: Coevolution of LLM and Retrieval Model for Domain-Specific Information Retrieval (2025.emnlp-main)
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Ang Li, Yiquan Wu, Yinghao Hu, Lizhi Qing, Shihang Wang, Chengyuan Liu, Tao Wu, Adam Jatowt, Ming Cai, Fei Wu, Kun Kuang
| Challenge: | Recent methods to enhance queries by generating intermediary elements can degrade retrieval performance . combining LLMs and retrievers can be difficult, resulting in unreliable or irrelevant intermediaries . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that facilitates the coevolution of large language models and retrieval models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework facilitates the coevolution of LLMs and retrieval models. |
Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks to Predict What Happen Next (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on event representation cannot capture discontinuous event segments . Existing models cannot represent heterogeneous relations and discontinuous events . |
| Approach: | They propose a heterogeneous-event graph network to model missing events . they employ each unique word and individual event as nodes in the graph . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on one-step and multi-step inference tasks. |
Too Consistent to Detect: A Study of Self-Consistent Errors in LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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Hexiang Tan, Fei Sun, Sha Liu, Du Su, Qi Cao, Xin Chen, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Yuanzhuo Wang, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing detection methods fail to account for **self-consistent error** . study identifies self-consistency errors and evaluates them . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that fuses hidden state evidence from an external verifier LLM to detect self-consistent errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly enhances performance on self-consistent errors across three LLM families. |
Generating Classical Chinese Poems from Vernacular Chinese (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for classical Chinese poetry generation only allow users to use keywords to interfere with the meaning of generated poems. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to generate classical Chinese poems from vernacular . their model uses unsupervised machine translation to generate Chinese poems . human evaluation shows it can generate high-quality poems comparable to amateur poems - authors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the perplexity and BLEU of the proposed model compared with typical models and human evaluation shows it generates high-quality poems comparable to amateur poems. |
Entity-centered Cross-document Relation Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)
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Fengqi Wang, Fei Li, Hao Fei, Jingye Li, Shengqiong Wu, Fangfang Su, Wenxuan Shi, Donghong Ji, Bo Cai
| Challenge: | Existing methods for relation extraction only use text snippets surrounding target entities in multiple documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a relation-extraction model that uses cross-path entity relation attention to detect the semantic relations between entities in a given text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in the dataset CodRED by 10%. |
Multi-Scale Distribution Deep Variational Autoencoder for Explanation Generation (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating explanations for recommender systems produce generic explanations that fail to incorporate user and item specific details. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-scale distribution deepvariational autoencoder with a prior network that eliminates noise while retaining meaningful signals in the input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can generate explanations with concrete input-specific contents. |
Generation of Patient After-Visit Summaries to Support Physicians (2022.coling-1)
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Pengshan Cai, Fei Liu, Adarsha Bajracharya, Joe Sills, Alok Kapoor, Weisong Liu, Dan Berlowitz, David Levy, Richeek Pradhan, Hong Yu
| Challenge: | After-visit summary is a summary note given to patients after their clinical visit. |
| Approach: | They propose to automate the generation of after-visit summaries and introduce a feedback mechanism that alerts physicians when an automatic summary fails to capture important details of the clinical notes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves on a large clinical dataset that contains electronic health record (EHR) notes and their associated summaries. |
Legal Judgment Prediction based on Knowledge-enhanced Multi-Task and Multi-Label Text Classification (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Legal judgment prediction (LJP) is an essential task for legal AI, aiming at predicting judgments based on the facts of a case. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-enhanced approach that incorporates 'label-level knowledge' to enhance the representation of case facts for each task and 'task-level' knowledge to improve synergy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is effective in comparison to state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines. |
Learning as Conversation: Dialogue Systems Reinforced for Information Acquisition (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | a novel AI-empowered chat bot for learning as conversation can be applied to various domains without in-domain dialogue data. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel task where a user does not read a passage but gains information and knowledge through conversation with a teacher bot. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can be transferred to various domains without in-domain dialogue data and can carry out conversations both informative and attentive to users. |
TextFlint: Unified Multilingual Robustness Evaluation Toolkit for Natural Language Processing (2021.acl-demo)
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Xiao Wang, Qin Liu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Yicheng Zou, Xin Zhou, Jiacheng Ye, Yongxin Zhang, Rui Zheng, Zexiong Pang, Qinzhuo Wu, Zhengyan Li, Chong Zhang, Ruotian Ma, Zichu Fei, Ruijian Cai, Jun Zhao, Xingwu Hu, Zhiheng Yan, Yiding Tan, Yuan Hu, Qiyuan Bian, Zhihua Liu, Shan Qin, Bolin Zhu, Xiaoyu Xing, Jinlan Fu, Yue Zhang, Minlong Peng, Xiaoqing Zheng, Yaqian Zhou, Zhongyu Wei, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to textual robustness evaluation focus on slightly modifying the input data, which maintains the original meaning and results in a different prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual robustness evaluation toolkit for NLP that integrates universal text transformations, task-specific transformations and adversarial attack. |
| Outcome: | The toolkit includes universal text transformation, task-specific transformation, adversarial attack, subpopulation, and their combinations to provide comprehensive robustness analyses. |